Proudly the Opposite of What Passes for Progressive

Tag Archives: Mark Steyn

Does anyone care to place bets on when we will get the first politician in Canada to stand up and make a speech using “genderless pronouns”? It may be sooner than you think – maybe as soon as next year…. maybe even this year.

The same way Kathleen Wynne obnoxiously pays homage in hir every speech to the Indigenous tribe on whose ancestral lands zie stands, we’re going to see Liberal and NDP politicians start referring to ‘zie’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’.

No? Don’t think it can happen? You are naïve then.

The federal Liberals are all set to pass Bill C-16 which will outlaw the discrimination and harassment of individuals based on their gender identity. Not actual physically gender, but what that person identifies as. Identity.

Don’t forget that it was Canada’s over-reaching human rights legislation that spawned provincial and federal Human Rights Commissions, where just being offended or insulted it seemed was grounds for being charged with human rights violations. In Quebec now a teacher cannot criticize Muslims without being brought before a Human Rights Commission. A comedian in BC cannot insult hecklers without being levied a $40,000 fine. Mark Steyn and Maclean’s had an epic battle with the human rights courts for simply suggesting the “future belonged to Islam” which was interpreted to be anti-Muslim. Thankfully the Conservatives (belatedly) repealed the law.

But here come the Liberals and their Hirster-in-Chief.

It would serve everyone well to become familiar then with the use of these new pronouns;

HE/SHE

HIM/HER

HIS/HER

HIS/HERS

HIMSELF/HERSELF

zie

zim

zir

zis

zieself

sie

sie

hir

hirs

hirself

ey

em

eir

eirs

eirself

ve

ver

vis

vers

verself

tey

ter

tem

ters

terself

e

em

eir

eirs

emself

See, while this legislation is intended to virtue signal what a kind and tolerant society we have what it does instead is give the SJW bullies another club to beat us with. Case in point – this brave University of Toronto professor who is pushing back against the university’s human resources directive, that all professors begin using gender-less pronouns. Zie will soon be a pariah.

“If Peterson fears the Trudeau government passing Bill C-16 into law, he should smarten up his act by upgrading his ethics circuits, not by trying to marshal opposition to basic human rights protections for people he refuses to even try to understand,” added Peet.”

Just examine the frightening power in that quote – zero acknowledgement of concerns or validity to the other side, rather the onus is on Professor Peterson to “upgrade his ethics circuits” because he’s clearly evil, zie has moral failings if zie‘s engaged in Wrong Think.

Wait a second – did Professor Peet check with Professor Peterson if zie wants to be called “he”? Uh oh.

We wish zim good luck, but in all likelihood zis position at the university will become untenable because in the great hierarchy of evils in the eyes of the left, after racism and climate change denial, comes opposition to trans-gender rights.

The SJW’s envision a world where before you speak to someone you each, as a matter of courtesy, inform the other person of the pronouns you would like used. Seriously. This is not new and many universities across the US have already instructed their students to adopt this new protocol of human interaction.

So one can easily imagine a future of people, in all manners of private and public businesses being charged for failing to properly address a person by their self-identified gender or using genderless pronouns. It will be paralyzing. And you can laugh it off as paranoid fantasy, but these people will have the Law behind them. The most powerful person in any work place setting will now become that one employee that forces everyone to learn a new language and forces emails and memos to be rewritten to suit their sensibilities.

Justin Trudeau, early next year. That’s my bet for the first politician and when.

Who remembers the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup hockey riot from a couple of years ago? The Canucks lost in game seven of the finals to the Boston Bruins and then fans in Vancouver promptly rioted and, in the end, nearly 300 people were convicted of crimes during the riot but many more escaped any charges because they couldn’t be identified. Four people were stabbed, hundreds wounded, nine police officers hurt and property damage was over $4 million including widespread looting.

There was a lot of hand wringing after the fact about the identities of these rioters; generally young but university educated, employed and seemingly decent persons in their normal day lives. So the explanations evolved to the whole event being a narrative on what a spoiled, entitled, and moral-less generation millennials have become. But that didn’t explain everything; there was quite a bit of discussion about mob mentality, crowd psychology and how people can be swept up in the spirit of a riot and lose their common sense and moral bearings.

From Gustave Le Bon, who was a leader in the analysis of mob psychology:

“Crowd behavior is heavily influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual and the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with the size of the crowd.”

There is clearly some reciprocity at work; persons looking to relieve themselves of responsibility actually look for crowds to become part of, they embrace crowds. Hence why the “good” kids in Vancouver, when they saw a riot brewing, a crowd with ignoble purpose they didn’t run the other way or try to stop it even, they surrendered to it and fell in. Because it gave them the feeling they were absolved of responsibility.

All of which brings us to “virtue signaling”… You know what virtue signaling is; the changing your Facebook profile pic to the colours of the French or Belgian flag when there’s a terrorist attack, the sending of unsolicited emails to 300 people at a time with links to climate-alarmist videos, the changing of the words of your national anthem because “in all thy son’s command” can’t be interpreted in any generic sense and excludes half the nation, the hashtag campaigns to #bringbackourgirls… in the immortal words of Bill Burr (see around 3:52 in this clip);

She’s sitting there holding up those hashtags, “BringBackOurGirls””

Remember that hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

That blew my mind, like why are you asking me that, I am a stand-up comedian. Like what am I going to do to get back the girls?

Why don’t you look across the dinner table, you see that guy? That is the leader of the free world; tell him to pick up a phone, call some NAVY Seals and solve it….What am I going to do?

Virtue signaling are all those symbolic gestures that in the end amount to nothing. They get nothing accomplished except… make it widely known to all your friends, families and peers that YOU CARE. You are a caring, empathic, wonderful human being. You are good and you are announcing it to the world. But there’s the whole crowd aspect of virtue signaling too that would explain in part why there always seems to be stampede like a herd on Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media sites to immediately proclaim your solidarity with the victims of this tragedy or that tragedy, like the most recent Orlando shootings. Proclaiming your sympathies and solidarity with gay people is the very least you can do, but I believe the great majority rush to do this as quickly as they can because then there is the inference that that’s it, they’re done. Their responsibility in the matter has ended. They have washed away or diluted their responsibility in the crowd they have joined by virtue signaling. It’s intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt, but that is the society we are living in today. Take the easy road. As Mark Steyn so aptly puts it in this clip, most of society goes on frolicking in the fields, holding hands and singing about our wonderful lives, and the conservatives are the ones left to look at the world as it truly is and be labelled as the mean or racist or bigoted ones.

Conservatives are not innocent of virtue signaling, we certainly do our share of it. But we need to point it out whenever we see it and call people out on it, because only shaming people and pointing out the uselessness of symbolism over substance will provide at least a modicum of resistance to this increasing herd mentality. When you see the left contorting itself so that they can claim the Orlando shooting is an unfortunate result of the marginalization of two communities, gay and Muslim, you know you are seeing overt virtue signaling that will not accomplish anything other than make the situation worse. We cannot seek out crowds to join that let us shirk responsibility for dealing with the root causes of problems just because it might make us seem harsh or uncaring.

The artist and the fundamentalist arise from societies at differing stages of development. The artist is the advanced model. His culture possesses affluence, stability, enough excess of resource to permit the luxury of self-examination. The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He was born in the right place. He has a core of self-confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world. The fundamentalist entertains no such notion. In his view, humanity has fallen from a higher state. The truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx. Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal.

The bolding of words is mine.

So let us consider that very succinct description of fundamentalism in context with the recent John Robson article and the Munk debate from last Friday of which people are shocked that the pro-refugee side actually lost the debate when the audience was polled at the end of the event.

Here’s my thesis; the Islamic world is a failure. Despotic rulers, poverty, backwards misogynist cultures… they’re a failure and have been for quite some time now. They’ve “lost” to the West and modernity. The people in those lands are confused, disheartened, defeated, they don’t know how to deal with this new liberty especially in places like Iraq where it was forced on them because the neo-con arrogance was that people want and embrace freedom. So Muslims come to the West, either physically or metaphorically, looking for rules and guidance on how to navigate the “free” world because they lack the tools for self-regulation, as do great swaths of humanity, even in the West.

But per the Robson article and Charles Murray and others, progressives have been so successful over the past 40 years destroying Western culture and the institutions it was built on that these people come to the West and find nothing, a vacuum. No structure, no rules, no ideas on how to regulate themselves. And so they turn to fundamentalists who tell them this freedom stuff is for the birds, we need to return to a time in history (the Caliphate) when things were known, when faith ruled the day and we were in our glory. And they buy into it – even two or three generations into being Western, because even great swaths of youth in the West are lost in a culture that holds nothing sacred anymore and just looks steady for the next thing to tear down.

Freedom is messy, incoherent and confusing. For the most part, anyone who might read this post is lucky- we’ve been blessed with a good upbringing and rooting in character fundamentals that give us the ability to more or less successfully self-regulate our own behaviours and navigate our free lives. But a great number of people in our own countries and across the planet are not as fortunate, and they have no idea how to deal with their lives. Once upon a time here in the West, we had a dominant culture and traditional institutions that may have helped people get through life, but now those are being laid to waste. And so we offer people who have difficulties nothing. You’re on your own. And that’s why they turn to fundamentalism because there’s answers there.

So, the idea that we should hold out our hands and bring in millions of migrants and refugees into the West is an increasingly absurd proposition in these current times because it is akin to people on a sinking ship volunteering to pull people aboard from a life boat. They may not be jihadists or fundamentalists before they get here, but ironically we’re the ones who’ve made the conditions ripe for them to turn that way once they get here.